Your Doubt Is Shedding All Over Me And It’s Making My Eyes Water

The Daily News sheds doubt on the story (about which doubt was earlier shed) that one “homeless drunkard” could have set the fire that destroyed all those historic buildings (and severely singed a cat):

The Polish immigrant accused of igniting the inferno that devoured historic warehouses on the Brooklyn waterfront may have a solid alibi.
Leszek Kuczera was feeding horses and cleaning out a campground 85 miles away in upstate New York when the Greenpoint Terminal Market went up in flames May 2, the contractor who hired him told the Daily News yesterday.

“It would have been impossible for him to have started that fire because he was here, working for me,” said Zbigniew Sarna of Pond Eddy, N.Y. “I hired him a couple days after Easter and he lived in my home until I brought him back to Greenpoint on May 11. I wanted him to stay because he was a good worker.”

Sarna’s claim casts doubt on the case against Kuczera, who confessed on videotape to accidentally starting the city’s biggest blaze since 9/11, according to police. Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne declined to comment about the development but said detectives had been dispatched to Pond Eddy to check out Sarna’s story.

Kuczera, 59, was indicted Monday on charges of reckless endangerment, burglary and arson. He is being held on Rikers Island and faces seven years in prison.

Tom Cleary of the Legal Aid Society said it too will check out Kuczera’s alibi. “If it’s strong enough, we’ll try to get him released,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Polish Consulate wants to know whether the interpreter the NYPD provided for Kuczera — who speaks hardly any English despite having lived in New York for 15 years — understood what the suspect was saying.

Kuczera told cops he and another man were trying to burn insulation off stolen copper wire when they accidentally started the fire, police said. But Kuczera’s wife, who says the horrors her husband witnessed working at Ground Zero after 9/11 turned him into a homeless drunkard, said, “We never believed he started this fire.”

“How can a person be accused of such a thing without knowing the whole story?” Hanna Kuczera, who lives in Lublin, Poland, asked the Dziennik Wschodni newspaper.